


A Missing Essential

by Stranger



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Aliens, Casual Sex, DADT, Friendship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-22
Updated: 2016-10-22
Packaged: 2018-08-23 21:07:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8342731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stranger/pseuds/Stranger
Summary: Jack sees that Daniel is getting a life, now and then, after returning from Abydos.  He's glad for Daniel unless it affects the SG teams.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the first season of SG-1, which aired in 1997, before DADT went the way of the dodo. Written approximately 2001.  
> Thanks to PrincessofG, who encouraged me to keep writing in SG-1, and to ninja007 on [stargate-search](http://stargate-search.livejournal.com/), who nudged me to post it.

Daniel itched, with an ache of loneliness where Sha're wasn't. He hadn't wanted anyone else since he'd first touched her, but since he'd last touched her… there was no one.

He didn't always notice during the hours taken up by work. The languages and artifacts even older than the Goa'uld absorbed enough of his mind to erase other thoughts, but sometimes, alone at night, he thought of Sha're and the itch of loneliness went deep and became another kind of desire.

Sha're wasn't here, with her sharp mind and her welcoming body that redefined sex first as discovery and then as lovemaking. He only had an itch, and memories from before Abydos, when he'd satisfied it without much emotional baggage.

# # #

The bar was on the short list of the addresses he'd researched, and it felt right — casual but not rough, people he recognized in type if not in particular.

Two men were playing billiards: the short, dark-haired one sinking neat shots and missing them just as often, the taller one wavering and realigning until he was satisfied with a move, then making it with precision. Three turns later he'd won the game. The loser grinned, shrugged, and retired to finish his beer. The winner looked around as though weighing the merits of solo practice or further competition. Daniel stayed in the light around the table and let the man's eye catch him.

"Want a game?" asked the tall one. He had sandy hair, was pale rather than tanned, with a rangy, gangling look that made him seem younger than he probably was.

"I'm out of practice," said Daniel, accepting a cue and enduring the quick once-over without flinching. The eyes were friendly, after all. That was different now; he remembered the agonizing embarrassment of the first few times he'd been looked over like this. The pick-up routine at a men's bar was barely veiled and devastatingly honest.

Funny, it was different when you'd really died. When a godlike alien had dismissed you as unworthy of interest — and been wrong. When you'd had Sha're at your side for long enough to believe, a little, that she had a right to look to you for miracles.

She was gone and he had to do miracles anyway, and nothing else mattered. If there was an itch, you scratched it; if there was a laugh along the way, all the better, but after that it was back to looking for Sha're and miracles in a universe that was much larger and more miraculous and scarier than he'd even dreamed back in school.

"I'm Tom," said the man, finishing the once-over, smiling. They shook hands. "No bet, just a game. Are you game?"

Daniel chuckled. "Lowest form of humor," he said. "I'm Dan. Okay."

They played, and signals went back and forth, and an hour later they left together for Daniel's apartment and bedroom.

There was nothing much in the apartment yet beyond furniture and some bookcases. Tom said, "You've just moved in, looks like."

"Near enough," said Daniel. He hadn't felt like decorating and his papers and notes had to stay at the SGC.

"Hey, me too. New place to work, y'know?" Tom looked around the living room. "It's like a library in here, Dan. You read a lot, don't you?"

"Yes. I like it."

"Me, too, sometimes. History, Civil War, railroads, stuff like that."

"The Civil War?" asked Daniel, interested despite himself.

"The War Between the States, man. Did you know they had photography back then?"

"I've seen Mathew Brady's work. It was all time exposures, wasn't it? It would have been perfect for archaeological digs, even that early, but too many people thought photography was just a parlor trick. And the silver compounds and glass in the plates was expensive enough that it wasn't a casual experiment…" He heard himself babbling and glanced at Tom.

"You sure know a lot about it."

"I talk too much. Would you like a beer, or coffee?" offered Daniel. "Or bedroom now?" This was faster than it would have happened at school, but he recognized the progression, the itch ready to be satisfied.

"Bedroom." Tom laid a possessive hand on his belt buckle.

"I, ah—" Daniel put both arms around him.

"New in town? Out of practice?"

"Yes, both." There was a pleasant tension in his gut, warmth coiling and rising. "I want…"

"I bet I know."

"I'll tell you anyway." Daniel spoke softly into an ear, not trying to kiss Tom, not sure he wanted to. "You like my ass. I like that." He couldn't seem to make long sentences. Old desires were awakening rapidly. "But it's been a while."

"No problem." Tom was rubbing against him, warm and hard. "I can do slow." The movement against him slowed in demonstration, a hard bulge dragging along his own with rough slow pressure. He wanted more, harder, soon.

"Safe sex," Daniel gasped, and started to repeat it.

"'M not stupid," said Tom against his mouth. "'V got some with me."

"Good."

They made it to the bedroom moments later, and Daniel forgot everything but the itch and the deep, painful satisfaction of someone — something — inside him, pushing and straining to complete a circuit that connected directly to his hindbrain. _Lizard brain_   he thought, and even in disconnected lust his mind flinched away from the words. _Lizard. Snake. No._ The sensation was all he wanted: deep, raw friction that made him come. He wasn't here to think.

The thing driving into him groaned in turn and when the haze of lust subsided, Tom was still there, body curved around his in human warmth too rare to be ignored. "Nice, Dan," he said, and when Daniel sighed but did not reply, he repeated, "Nice," and moved just enough that they weren't touching.

Daniel flopped onto his back, still feeling boneless, and watched the other man survey the bedroom. Tom's curiosity at the stacks of books piled everywhere — Daniel hadn't got around to setting up bookcases here — was obvious, and a little flattering.

"Where d'you get them all, Dan? History of… Upper Egypt? And that one's Latin or something, but what's this language?"

"They're mostly from school. I have a degree in archaeology." Daniel squinted without his glasses, and identified a stack by color. "The top one's early Arabic, and the others are Egyptian, which is kind of like Arabic."

"Cool," said Tom. "You read these?"

"Better than the Latin," said Daniel, honestly. "I spent some time in Egypt. I got used to thinking the language for a while."

"Doing archaeology?"

"Yes."

"Is that all you did there?"

The inquisitive tone was too persistent. "I hope that's not a personal question," he said, gently and firmly.

Tom wasn't stupid. "Not if you don't want it to be." He turned over on the bed to look at Daniel, running a hand down one leg.

Daniel tried to say something appropriate. "I like… you… the way you…" He'd had a few encounters in school, but more on field digs, more often in Egyptian dialects of Arabic than in English. "I'm sorry. I'm not very articulate, but I liked it."

"Yeah?" said Tom. "I think I guessed." He went on stroking Daniel's hip. "Nice ass, Dan. Really nice."

Daniel smiled, feeling a little silly and absurdly shy. "I… um…"

Tom brushed a hand over his mouth. "Don't try to talk. You don't have to say anything. It was great."

"Well, um." He lay back on the unkempt sheets and let his mind drift. He was thirsty. "How about something to drink? Soda, beer, lemonade?"

Tom grinned. "Sure, anything," and Daniel pushed himself up and wandered without his glasses out to the blurry kitchen, detouring to a blurry bathroom on the way. When he returned with two refrigerated bottles, Tom was poking through the pile of his own discarded clothes.

"No need to hurry," said Daniel.

"Not yet," said Tom, accepting a bottle and sitting back to regard Daniel's nudity easily, apparently comfortable with his own. "But soon…" He shrugged.

"Okay," said Daniel. A bar pick-up didn't imply a night's stay. He sat on a clean part of the bed, sipping tea-flavored lemonade and letting his gaze wander idly over Tom's clothes. A glint of blurry metal tags on top of the pile caught his attention. "Oh. You're in the military. I didn't guess."

"Air Force," said Tom. "I guess you're not." Daniel managed not to say anything, and if he twitched, Tom didn't notice. "Most guys know right away from the hair." He gathered up the chain and tucked it into the pocket of the rather aggressively civilian red-striped shirt in the pile.

Daniel let his eyebrows go up. "Do the chains get in the way?"

"Kinda," said Tom. "I kinda like not worrying about it, sometimes. I like things uncomplicated."

Wasn't that was Daniel wanted? Sex as a simple exchange of sensation and release? "Me too. Want to do it again?"

"Sure. I could stay for that." Tom set his bottle down on the floor. "Now?"

"Right now…" He pulled Tom close, feeling the rise of too-easy lust and nothing else.

Tom was touching him again, not at all awkward about it. Daniel didn't feel awkward, just numb except for the sexual heat, the itch.

# # #

Jack O'Neill was in the Gateroom before anyone else on either of the SG teams for the mission to P94-345. He was the leader; it behooved him to lead. He was happy to find that Major Ivan of SG-6 had a similar philosophy. They'd done the initial look-see on the planet.

The SG-6 team commander arrived only five minutes after Jack, well before the scheduled embarkation time. Major Ivan was relatively new to the SGC, but Jack had already decided that he'd better just ignore her as a well-favored brunette and concentrate on her absolutely professional style. She strode in, exuding energy, her regular-army posture ignoring both their genders. Jack didn't quite succeed at it but he made the effort, and was glad he had when Carter appeared bare moments later. "Sir." She glanced at Ivan. "Ma'am."

"Captain," said Ivan, after Jack's nod of acknowledgement. "No problems, Sam?"

At the briefing with the major and SG-1, General Hammond had made it clear that the SG-6 team's first mission (like Jack's) was to guard the SG-1 scientists as they investigated apparently abandoned ruins near the P94-345 Stargate, but a secondary goal was further survey of the planet and any inhabitants who might still be there.

"None at all," said Carter. "Two hand trucks are on their way. Teal'c has one and Corporal Emmett will bring the other."

"Good work." The major turned to Jack. "Colonel, it looks like we'll need two hand trucks for all the supplies. With your permission…"

"That's fine, Major," said Jack. "Carry on. Carter, is Daniel on his way too or do we have to nudge him?"

"He's on his way. In fact…" The next sound they heard was a burst of deep-bass chuckling followed by an incomprehensible utterance in Daniel's voice, and a bass rumble of the unfamiliar laughter. Teal'c? Was that Teal'c? Did Teal'c laugh?

Teal'c entered, pushing a laden hand truck, still perceptibly smiling. Jack blinked. Wonders might never cease. "Ah, Major, have you met the rest of my team? The large gentleman with the truck is Teal'c. You'll have been briefed about him. The other one is Doctor Daniel Jackson."

"Jackson," she said, nodding. "Teal'c." They exchanged handshakes.

"Care to share the joke?" asked Jack. Teal'c now wore his usual impassive mask.

"It's better in Chulaki," said Daniel, going into earnest lecture mode without a pause. "Situational humor, kind of. I'm not sure I can translate it."

"Excuse me, 'Chulaki'?" put in Major Ivan.

"Teal'c's native language." Daniel glanced at Teal'c and then at Jack, eyebrows raised, as if he needed permission to explain.

The major forestalled him, speaking to Teal'c. "Of course. Is it a language all Jaffa use, or your native language, or something else?" she asked, proving she'd been briefed. "I hope it isn't rude to ask."

Teal'c said, gravely, "It is not. A full answer would take some time." Jack wondered, again, if the impassive demeanor was simply Teal'c making sure he didn't broadcast some inappropriate signal. Teal'c was, after all, living far from home, using a language that wasn't his first and maybe not his third. It was no wonder if Daniel, the only person on Earth he didn't have to speak English with, saw a different side of Teal'c.

"Later, then," said the major, probably because the rest of her team had arrived while they were talking. "Colonel O'Neill, Captain Carter, Teal'c, Doctor Jackson, this is SG-6."

Jack had seen their records and met all of them during training sessions, but it was the major's privilege to introduce her team. More practically, it was a good bet that parts of SG-1, especially including a certain head-in-the-clouds workaholic archaeologist, hadn't met them all, and vice versa. The major went on: "Captain Penn, Sergeant Stanopous, Corporal Emmett."

Teal'c gave three solemn nods. Carter had obviously met them earlier and just nodded as well before her eyes skipped back to the second hand truck with its load of packing crates. Daniel said, "Hi, Benjamin," to Penn, noticed that Irene Stanopous was female and gave her a shy, defensive nod with the handshake. He hadn't done that with the major, Jack recalled, but Major Ivan hadn't really given him a chance. He said then, "Oh. Corporal Emmett. Good morning."

"Good morning," said the corporal, a young man taller than Daniel and shorter than Teal'c, "Doctor Jackson."

"Fine, fine," said Jack. "Major, let's get this show on the road. Everybody okay?"

There was a chorus of "Yes sir"s from the military personnel and an impassive look of agreement from Teal'c. Daniel was frowning in an abstract daze, but he gave a stifled mumble and a jerky nod.

And they were off. Wagons ho, or the space-age equivalent. The Gate spouted light and subsided to a gleaming shimmer, he and Carter led the way into it, and after the requisite tear-you-apart-freeze-your-pieces-and-reset-the-jigsaw through dimensions Jack didn't like to think about, everyone landed, more or less together, on P94-345's rocky (not coral) strand. Even the hand trucks made it intact.

# # #

Jack had planned on three working groups. Carter and Teal'c would be at what looked like an alien mechanic's abandoned workshop in a framework of a building littered with gadgets in various stages of assembly. They would assess each object, assign probable origin and function and utility, and pack anything worth further study for transport home. The stuff might be Goa'uld, it might be technology from the when the Nox had visible technology, it might be playtoys for infant Berserkers. Nobody knew yet. It had finally got through to someone higher up than General Hammond that collecting even non-working fragments of the Goa'uld technology they were up against, or other technologies that had competed with it, could lead to useful defenses and weapons. _It sure took them long enough._ Now that somebody had the idea, they wanted samples. Immediately.

Another enclosure near the Stargate was, unlike the rest, an honest-to-god constructed building with intact walls, set at some distance from everything else. It contained what appeared to be a library. That was, it contained a lot of dirty scrolls with writing on them. Daniel had taken one look at SG-6's recon pictures and gone into High Archaeologist Ecstasy mode, and hadn't come out yet.

In the months since the second Abydos mission, Jack remembered Daniel as bewildered, then grieving and sullen, eventually work-obsessed, and now at last he looked like he was enjoying life now and then. It was about time, Jack thought. With Daniel ecstatic every conversational road led to comparative philology sooner or later, but an upbeat Daniel had it all over the stunned, withdrawn man who'd come back from Abydos and Chulak.

The third group would be Jack with Major Ivan and the rest of SG-6, patrolling the flat plain that stretched as far as they'd been able to map around the Gate area, to watch for Goa'uld or for the stray natives who attacked all humans, as SG-6 had found out the hard way. The protection squad might be overkill, but the brass were enthusiastic about collecting this particular cache of mysterious artifacts, and Jack had had to agree that at least some of the loot looked to be more advanced than rocks. For a change.

Teal'c and Carter and one of the hand trucks peeled off at the workshop site, the one closest to the Gate, without any problems, and the rest of them proceeded, trundling the other truck on its broad, squishy, all-terrain tires, to the library. Daniel was already jittering with eagerness to get started.

"Wait," Jack told him. "We're going to do a sweep through first."

"A what?" Daniel looked from Jack to Captain Penn with anxious eyes. "Don't touch anything. Any kind of vibration will shake the ink off, if it's as old as I think it is. Some of these may disintegrate if they're touched. We'll have to photograph it all before I move anything…"

"We'll act like we're in a library," said Jack, exasperated. "We'll just check to make sure nobody else is in there. If something is inside waiting to jump you, that would do a lot more damage to the ink than us just walking though going 'shhh.'"

"Okay, okay." Daniel shook his head. "Tiptoe, huh?"

"We'll tiptoe," said Jack, and jerked his head at Penn. Major Ivan had the two junior members of the team in a huddle nearby, pointing out directions on a printout map from the recon survey. Jack displaced Daniel in the doorway and took a good look inside. "This place is all passages and corners. Anything could sneak up on you."

"I guess. Just do it, okay?"

"See ya in five." Jack ducked into the building, which if he knew anything about the Goa'uld wasn't nearly flashy or spacious enough to be one of theirs, and made a careful, tiptoe survey of the entire maze. It _was_   a library, all shelves and corners and niches full of the curling scraps.

The hole in one corner near the entrance led to a cellar. "Captain, cover me," said Jack, and broke out his flashlight. He could just imagine Daniel's horror if he lit a flare anywhere near all this parchment, or papyrus, or whatever all these scrolls were made of.

The basement contained rocks. Jack groaned. These weren't your everyday boulder-pebble rocks. These were _artifacts_. He recognized the breed by now. Daniel would want them, and he'd need extra manpower to shift them all. Jack made sure nothing alive and nothing resembling a deadfall trap lurked in the basement, and then poked his head up through the opening in the floor to where Penn waited patiently. "It's clear, but call Jackson over here, would you?" He grimaced. "Tiptoe."

A moment later Daniel appeared, a dusty outline in the dim, dusty air. Jack suppressed a sneeze that had nothing to do with allergies, wondering how Daniel, handkerchief king, was even surviving here. "Daniel, there're rocks down here. Your kind of rocks."

"Arti— My kind of rocks have writing on them."

"I think these do. Can you take a look? Are you going to want to carry all these home too, or can you skip them?"

Daniel tiptoed down the crumbly hard-dirt stairs that were hardly more than a bumpy ramp and produced his own flashlight. Two minutes and four near-orgasmic, breathy intakes of archaeological joy later, he managed to say audibly, "Yes. I'll want all this. I have to have this. It's the cuneiform precursor to Akkadian and Sumerian. It's the same as that, anyway. This could make everything on the main floor much, much more interesting if it links Earth's early Babylonian culture to a colony here."

"You can't skip them," said Jack, resigned to Daniel's joyful enthusiasm but rethinking his resources fast. The subtle difference between "the same as" and "is," he left to Daniel. This time.

"It would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I'll have to get the scrolls recorded and packed too, first, or tramping around down here will damage them."

"Uh, yeah. I can see that. Okay, let's back out on tiptoe now, and you can get started."

Penn, Daniel and then Jack emerged from the library building, Daniel in a haze of linguistic speculation. Jack could hear words like "para-Babylonian development" scattering on the breeze as Daniel offloaded two cameras and a light stand, along with a supply of videotape.

Jack headed to SG-6. "Major, small change of plan. Can you spare one of your people to stay here with Daniel? There are about twice as many artifacts as we estimated from the recon, and I'd like him to be able to pack up as many as possible."

The major looked over the surrounding the countryside. The only upright outlines were some scrawny trees which showed no sign of attacking them. "No problem, Colonel. Emmett, you stay at this site today."

"Here?" said Emmett. "Oh, here. Yes ma'am." The major gave him a glance but did not comment.

Jack motioned him over. "Jackson will show you what he wants done."

"Yes sir," said Emmett, still wooden. "Doctor Jackson. Yes sir."

"Any problems with that, Corporal?"

"No sir. No problem. I'll be glad to help Doctor Jackson."

Daniel paused in the act of fitting the battery pack into the light stand. "Umph. Oh. Emmett?" He shrugged. "Why not? Uh, Corporal Emmett, you've done photography before, haven't you?" The corporal made some kind of affirmative noise, but Daniel was off on a lecture already. "You know, we'll have to take some care, since the kind of lighting we have to use will degrade the pigments in the ink here. Remember the Lascaux caves?"

Jack blinked. "Uh, I can't say that I do. Was that the caves on P3X-888, or maybe P6Z-024?"

"Southern France," said Daniel absently.

"Oh," said Emmett, surprisingly. "I heard about them in…" He stopped.

"You did?" said Daniel.

"In one of those science-history sort of TV shows. Old cave art. The cave paintings went bad after they were exposed to too many flashbulbs." He took a glance around, at Daniel, who was listening, and at Jack who, staring, did not silence him. "I kind of wondered if unsealing the caves to the air might have been part of it. Rain and water vapor and stuff, you know."

"Good question," said Daniel. "But the weather here is drier than in France, and this building hasn't been sealed." He handed the light stand to the corporal. "We'll start at the entrance and work our way in. Photos first, then cataloging — don't worry about that part, I have to do it — and packing. Don't step anywhere or touch anything until I say, okay?"

There was a nervous undertone in Daniel's customary chatter, but after a moment Jack shrugged and left the two men to their work. He had a defense perimeter to organize. Anything could happen on these seemingly innocuous collection missions, usually at zero notice.

# # #

The first day, nothing showed up within the patrol area except a few more of the stunted trees. Major Ivan and Sergeant Stanopous split off north while Jack and Captain Penn went south, spiraling out slowly until midday, then spiraling back inward toward the Stargate area with its two collection teams and the designated campsite.

In the camp circle of eight tents, as eight MREs were stoically ingested, it seemed that Daniel and Corporal Emmett had found a common interest, for they sat together, murmurs of "early Babylonian format" and "post-Gate script development" escaping occasionally — and Emmett was actually listening.

Jack edged closer, and heard, from Emmett: "If you're not shitting me about the dates, what does it mean about the Snakes?"

"As we… as Earth knows it, _Gilgamesh_   is a highly stylized epic poem," said Daniel. "The events behind it are open to interpretation, but for most historians, only within limits. If we throw the basic meaning of it into doubt, it'll upset a lot of scholars." His smile was wry.

"And you'd like that, Dan?"

Dan? wondered Jack.

"Can't do it," said Daniel, not sounding upset. "I know they're wrong and I'm right. You know it. The only way they'll know it is by knowing a lot more about the Goa'uld than anyone wants to. I'll have to sit back and smile knowingly at them instead."

"So, what is _Gilgamesh_   about?"

"Ummm," said Daniel. "Kingship. Search for immortality. Sacrifice. And also, that clay tablets don't last very well over millennia. There're big chunks missing in all the copies. It's roughly — very roughly — concurrent with the early parts of the Old Testament, and it has one story of a flood that's comparable to the Ark story…"

"That's the Bible!"

"The creation of the world is in the Bible. You don't think it happened only to pre-Christian Jews, do you? Other people noticed the flood, or some flood." Daniel's eyes were dark in the twilight away from the lanterns. "The Bible has a snake story, and so does _Gilgamesh_. Knowing about the Goa'uld, what does that say?"

"Oh, maaann!" Emmett punched Daniel on the arm. "Don't bug me like that, Dan."

"Can't help it," said Daniel, smiling at him. "You asked enough questions to get me started thinking about the sources."

"That's not what I had in mind."

Daniel's eyes lifted to the other man's face in the chancy light. "Sorry. That's all I can think about while we're here."

"Yeah, I hear you, Dan-man."

"D'you want to keep on with the camera work? I can ask for Stanopous instead if it bothers you or anything. All that dust could bother anyone."

"Nah. I'm cool."

Jack stepped in. "Ah… Dan-man, I hope you're not losing anyone's religion here."

Daniel glanced up, eyes dark again. "Not that wasn't lost already."

Jack could relate. The remnants of his lapsed Catholic upbringing had been blasted to atoms by Ra over a year ago. That had hastened the breakup with Sarah, though it hadn't been the cause. "Have you lost a religion, Doctor Jackson?"

Daniel's face stayed closed. "Not to speak of. Even before…" He shrugged. "The snake imagery in Earth's _Gilgamesh_   might be significant. Or not. The pieces I've seen here suggest Goa'uld as a shaping influence, but in the story known on Earth, well," he was gaining speed and fluency by the second, "there's snake imagery in the oral history anywhere there were ordinary snakes. I'm not sure all of it relates to religion anyway." The quick babble stopped for breath, and Daniel glanced around. "Uh, am I boring people?"

"All gods are false gods," said Teal'c suddenly.

Jack saw Major Ivan's eyebrows go up, and by their expressions all of SG-6 were taken aback by the bluntness. Carter said, "Some humans believe that, but there are also human religions that understand a kind of god that couldn't be a Goa'uld."

"I'm a Deist" said Penn, suddenly. "There's really no imagery there, if you mean what I think you mean." He might be talking to Daniel or Teal'c or everyone in the circle.

Daniel took it up. "I don't quite know, actually. Can you… would you mind explaining it to an anthropologist? I don't mean to step on any toes. I'm just curious."

"Not tonight, but later maybe, if you want. Doctor Jackson, I thought you were the team's linguist."

"Well, yes. It kind of leads into other things, since people use a language to express something in the context of a culture. And there you are, talking about history instead of linguistics."

"History…" echoed Corporal Emmett.

"You said something about Civil War history earlier, didn't you?"

"The War Between the States. Yeah, well, at least it's in English."

"English is good," said Daniel, voice lightening. "It's been good for centuries. Wouldn't you say?" He looked around the circle, lantern light reflecting off his glasses.

# # #

In the second day on P94-345, Jack varied the uneventful patrols by spiraling back in the early afternoon to check on the two collection teams. If anything nasty came through the Gate at them, Teal'c and Carter would be an admirable first line of defense, and both of them had the brains to radio for help at the first sign of trouble. But, it didn't hurt to check.

Everything was quiet. Carter's site had a respectable stack of finished boxes, each with a sheaf of meticulous notes of her own and Teal'c's estimate of each object. Jack wasn't as enthusiastic about this trip as he'd been before Major Ivan's in-her-own-words description of the planet's natives, but at least the brass would be getting what they'd asked for. Jack's attention was caught by a page where the handwriting was a careful, square print unlike Carter's round scrawl, and after a moment he realized Teal'c must have written them. Well. He shouldn't be surprised. Just because Teal'c was physically strong, big, fast and alien didn't mean he was illiterate. He spoke, and surely read and wrote, at least two languages used by Jaffa. Jack shook his head at his own stupid surprise and moved on.

Daniel's site boasted a much larger pile of boxes filled with wrapped and padded fragments of scrolls. Voices from inside the building interrupted Jack's fascinated count: "Dan, you kill me. This line of scratches says whaaat?"

"It's in a variant of Akkadian, and it takes off from one of the precursors of the standard version of _Gilgamesh_. Here Bilgamesh — that was one early form of the name — having failed to gain immortality, seeks out another god who promises it. The symbol put in here for the god, Dumuzi, could be a Goa'uld marker symbol."

"Snakes. Why does it have to be—"

"Don't say it," said Daniel suddenly. "Good joke, really, but just don't, please."

"Sure, Dan."

"Now let me do notes for this shelf. You can set the light stand around that corner for the next lot. Don't touch anything but the floor."

"Geez, I know the drill by now."

"You're pretty fast," said Daniel's voice.

"For an amateur, you mean?" said Emmett's. "Or do you mean about last Sunday?" Jack held his breath and listened.

"That was Sunday," said Daniel. "We're on an SG mission now. Just forget Sunday."

"Geez…" Emmett's voice carried a distinct whine. "You are such a girl, Dan."

"That was Sunday, too." Daniel was thinking about something else — Jack knew the tone. Probably he was writing notes. "Let it alone, Tom."

Jack decided he'd better not learn any more about Daniel's social life with noncoms. If it happened off-base, he didn't need to know about it. Daniel seemed to understand the principle. He and Emmett — come to think of it, that was Corporal Elliott James Emmett, so what was _Tom_   about? — had stacked up an impressive number of packed boxes. They were an effective working team. That was all that mattered.

# # #

At camp that evening the group divided into the two separate teams, except that Carter joined Ivan and Stanopous with the SG-6 people, leaving Jack, Teal'c and Daniel on their own. It was quiet but peaceful. Jack stared up at the alien stars, trying to decide if Earth's familiar constellations could be hidden sideways in any part of this sky. If he could identify the galactic plane… maybe…

Behind him, Daniel and Teal'c murmured in Chulaki, Daniel chuckling now and then, Teal'c sounding as solemn as usual, but more talkative. Jack realized Daniel was trying the same phrase pattern over and over as Teal'c commented. Was it a language lesson? Daniel might well have learned yet another alien language in a few months.

On the other side of him came bursts of laughter from the SG-6 circle, Carter and Major Ivan's voices in the lead. It sounded like they'd really hit it off. Well, okay, thought Jack, there's nothing wrong with inter-team solidarity. It sounded like Daniel knew Corporal Emmett from somewhere, too. No harm done — Daniel was a civilian after all. In the past few weeks he'd brightened up and started taking actual time off, as though he had a life outside SGC. That wasn't a crime. Daniel could have friends, even if they were noncoms. He probably didn't make a distinction between officers and others — he barely did at SGC.

Another drift of laughter came across the gap. Daniel broke off a convoluted phrase in Chulaki and cocked an ear. "What are they talking about?"

"No idea," shrugged Jack. "Girl stuff?"

"None of the individuals there are girls," put in Teal'c.

"'Girl' is informal usage," said Daniel, instantly academic. "Adults may be referred to as girls or boys to indicate… uh, informality. Sometimes it's an insult, if the situation should be serious or respectful. Sometimes not."

Teal'c nodded, his impassive expression restored.

"I thought I heard my name," said Daniel.

"Should they laugh at you?"

"I don't know!" He pushed a hand through his hair, disarranging it. "Women are so — I mean, I had a chance to understand the female culture on Abydos, but on Earth I never met a female student who didn't act like she was _really_   from another planet."

Jack shrugged. He supposed that students of one kind or another comprised virtually all the women Daniel might have met since he was old enough to be interested, until the SG project. And they both knew what had happened then, and neither wanted to talk about it. Skip ahead. "What about Carter?" asked Jack. Daniel seemed to get along with her, in pretty much the vague-eyed style he used toward everyone.

"She's okay. She doesn't act like that, anyway." Daniel sounded surprised. "You know, I never thought about it. She's just Sam."

"Good thing," muttered Jack.

# # #

Their third day dawned as clear and early as ever. Jack discovered he wasn't the first one up, however: Daniel's tent was empty, and the day's ration of breakfast coffee had been brewed and, from the level in the pot, sampled. Major Ivan sat sipping her share in the morning silence. When Jack looked from Daniel's tent to her, she gave a tiny shrug. "He went thataway." A nod toward the distant library building. "I like a boy who knows his coffee."

Jack grinned and poured out a mug for himself. "Yeah, he speaks fluent caffeine, but for him it's only a stop on the way to the ancient language of the week."

She snorted and went back to her cup.

Captains Carter and Penn emerged, blinking, each from a separate tent and poured out mugs of coffee while taking up an amiable-sounding discussion of Philadelphia history and campanology — which meant bell-ringing, Jack gathered after a moment of careful listening — and acoustics. It was evidently a complicated joke from Penn, with a punchline about the crack in the Liberty Bell. Scientist humor. Carter guffawed. Ivan rolled her eyes. Jack tried for a that-was-okay-this-once demeanor. Penn asked, worrying at his MRE leftovers, "Where's the linguistics team?"

"Jackson's already up and out there," said the major. "I haven't seen Emmett, but he'd better show up in the next five minutes." This last was pitched to carry into all the tents. Emmett's tent shook as if someone were removing himself from a sleeping bag in haste; Stanopous appeared from her tent in a tumble of unbraided curls; and Teal'c simply appeared with the smooth inevitability of a conjuring trick.

The major looked satisfied. "Irene, you have time to finish your hair. Emmett," — to the still-mute, convulsing tent — "four minutes."

Four minutes later Emmett and Stanopous were sucking up the dregs of the coffee, and Jack started the morning briefing. "Now that everyone's accounted for — Emmett, you can relay this to Daniel when you join him — let me mention that this is our last day on this field trip, even if nothing goes wrong. Major, why don't you tell us what might go wrong?"

Major Ivan said, "The UAV recon showed signs of a track toward the Stargate from that direction." She pointed toward a barely-defined declivity in the southeast. "On our patrols, we've noticed that the track seems better-used than the recon pictures suggested, and I'd prefer to avoid any possibility of meeting the native people here, if we don't have to." Stanopous frowned in agreement, Penn lost all traces of good humor and raised his eyebrows in a gesture Jack interpreted as why-didn't-you-tell-us-before-we-spent-another-night-here-ma'am. Emmett, whose gear was in good order already, put down his coffee mug and began re-checking it.

Jack nodded at Ivan to go on, and she focused on the SG-1 team, "They're humanoid but not Earth-like humans. Indications are they shoot at humans and never bother to ask questions first."

"Is there any chance they're Goa'uld?" asked Carter.

"The weapons and technology don't look like it," said Major Ivan.

"There's always a chance," said Jack, "but that little 'shoot first' detail would get in the way of asking them anything. It's definitely something we'd like to know. Meanwhile, if anything does show up, it'll come from over there. And, not only are they going to shoot at us, we don't want to shoot back more than necessary. If they're potential allies, we don't want to piss them off. If they're Goa'uld and have bigger weapons than bows and arrows stashed someplace, we don't want to piss them off _yet_. The drill is: retreat toward the Gate, as fast as you can with all personnel and, next priority, both the trucks. Break down the camp now; we'll leave this evening even if nobody shows today. The camp packs go on Carter's truck. Any questions?"

There weren't. Without comment Teal'c packed Daniel's tent as well as his own and followed Carter to the workshop site, all before Jack had finished. The major and Stanopous departed on their now-established survey route, and Jack decided to make quite sure that Daniel was where he was supposed to be before he and Penn did the same. Daniel had claimed last night that he still had to pack the equivalent of the Library of Alexandria, which should nail him to the one place more effectively than steel shackles, but Jack planned to check on him anyway.

Daniel could be seen loading boxes onto the second truck as Emmett carried them out of the building. They were safe and busy. So far, so good. Jack waved as he went by, and spent a watchful but uneventful few hours looping south and east, and northwest around the Gate area, and then back in toward it for a noon check-in.

The equipment workshop was emptier than it had been but not empty. Carter's scrawl on the last batch of notes was rounder and hastier than ever, but she said she'd be ready to close down in four hours. Teal'c, staring at some alien device and putting down painstaking square words, raised his eyes. "I concur."

"Good. Carry on."

"Neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night, nor writer's cramp…" muttered Carter.

"I concur," said Teal'c, switching his pencil to the other hand. Jack left them to get on with it.

The library had more boxes loaded, two waiting, and angry voices sounding from the interior of the building. "I just can't be two people," said Emmett.

"I don't think I'm very good at it either," Daniel's voice was heavy. "Here, this will be the last box."

"Dan, I mean _Doctor Jackson_ , what did you think you were doing at Jerry's?"

"The same thing you were, I imagined."

"Oh, yeah? _I_   wasn't slumming." The tone was vicious.

Daniel, still even and heavy: "That wasn't quite what I thought. And what does that make you?" There was the hard-paper scraping sound of a box being folded closed.

"It makes _you_   married, I hear."

Daniel was silent for a moment. "Yes, I'm married."

"Then you were slumming. Weren't you? Or does it not count when you're carrying a torch for a Snake?"

More silence. "That wasn't really called for." Daniel's voice was brittle in a way Jack heard very seldom. "Sha're is my concern, not yours."

"I guess so, if you never mentioned her. Not even when we were—"

"That's enough." The tone was still clipped. "Can you change the subject?"

"I'll have to," Emmett was still being snide, "since I don't date married men."

Daniel said, quite flatly, "You don't have to date this one. Just set that last box over here and don't step on the artifacts. I'm nearly done."

Jack heard vague sounds from the hole in the library's dusty floor that might be rocks nestling into packing sheets and two people not speaking to each other. He backed away. Daniel was nearly done. Daniel was mad as hell, going by the ultra-reserved tone. Daniel was in a relationship with Emmett that was rivaled by his marriage. The inference was clear, and Jack had no idea what to feel.

If it fell under the "don't ask, don't tell" rule — he couldn't ask about it. That was one hot potato where Jack just followed the rules and didn't think. Daniel's friendships, or whatever, were none of his business until and unless Daniel or Emmett made it his business. Fine, that was how it was.

It was still… disorienting. Daniel, unfaithful to Sha're? Daniel, with a man? Daniel bothering to talk about it in the middle of an unread library? Those were all just about equally unlikely.

Jack made sure his retreat was silent.

Two minutes later, all social niceties were wiped from his mind when he saw the skirmish line approaching, not quite from the southeast but not from the Stargate. The people were unhuman — bipedal with strange proportions and joints — but the line formation was a combat basic. Each one carried a curved something the color of old bone, with a glitter of sharp points alongside. Something went _whhhsst, whsssttt_   before it buried itself cleanly into the hard, dry ground two feet away from him. They'd invented the recurve bow. Shit. And fletching. And some kind of really sharp arrowheads.

Jack was already on the ground, and a glance told him Penn too was unhurt, weapon ready.

He thumbed his radio link and heard an acknowledgement from the major. "O'Neill. The natives are _here_ , in the Stargate area. Not friendly. You two get back here, doubletime. It's time to leave. They've got bows and effective arrows, so watch it."

"On our way, sir. Ivan out." There was another _whhsst_   sound, another arrow shaft that bounced and skittered away. Jack raised his head just enough to take a sight and fired a stuttering, deafening burst of machine-gun fire over the attackers' heads, hoping to spook them.

"Penn. Get to Carter and Teal'c, get them ready to leave if they need help, and cover them to the Gate." He peeked, and saw the skirmish line gone ragged and further back. "Go!"

Penn went. That left Daniel and Emmett trapped in the building nearest the attack, with only Jack there to cover them. And, oh god, Daniel's truck full of artifacts, which Daniel would leave behind only under threat of imminent death and possibly not then. He looked again and saw a head poke itself half out the doorway at ground level, looking toward him. Emmett. He signaled "wait" and got to his feet, crouching, running to the building's cover.

"Sir?" Emmett did well in combat exercises or he wouldn't be here. He'd been here once before and lived through it.

"Hostiles, east of the Stargate, that way." Jack took another look, saw the ragged line re-forming, and sent another burst of gunfire over their heads.

"Get Jackson—"

"'M here." Daniel pushed a box out of the cellar opening. "One more to come. I want a minute, Jack. Sixty seconds, to load this stuff. Okay?"

If it got Daniel moving, it was a bargain. "Okay. Go."

The one minute was merely tense. The minutes after that felt like hours of running, moving, finding a path for the truck, pushing, pushing, crouching in its cover, watching behind at the line of natives that broke and paused at gunfire but always re-formed. Sooner or later they'd get the idea that it was just noise, and then Jack would have to hurt somebody. They had gray-blue heads and swiveling elbows, but they were somebodies. And those bows packed a nasty punch.

The natives scored the first hit. Halfway to the Gate, Emmett dodged between the truck and the newest hail of arrows and went down with an arrow in one leg, giving a choked gasp instead of a scream.

"Get him onto the truck," said Jack. He pulled a grenade off his belt, armed it, counted, and threw for a spot two-thirds between him and them. It should herd them back, scare them off, shake them up. Leave them alive. The Goa'uld wouldn't be so gentle on them. And vice versa, maybe, which was the point here.

"Tom," said Daniel. "I— Dammit. This will hurt." He picked up the corporal, balanced, lifted with an effort, and slid him onto the top layer of boxes. Emmett gasped a not-quite-scream again. "We'll get you home."

The grenade seemed to have dismayed the natives enough that Jack could help push the now-doubled weight of the truck nearly to the Stargate platform. Teal'c and Carter were waiting. Ivan and Stanopous were visible in the distance. So was a line of blue-headed natives chasing them.

In a smooth one-two, first the sergeant and then the major turned, fired a burst close above the skirmish line, and made another sprint. The natives didn't quite ignore it, but the regroup was very quick.

Jack started toward them, and then saw the major picking something off her belt. She waved Stanopous toward the Gate, then in one motion flung the thing and turned to sprint again. The dozen or so natives stumbled — or flew — backward when the landscape in their path exploded in a gout of dirt and flame. Good move, thought Jack. Glad I thought of it. Glad she did too.

Jack pivoted back to the waiting group. "Carter, phone home!" He didn't bother to watch. "Daniel—" Daniel was already hauling Emmett off the hand truck to the accompaniment of harsh breathing and near-moans. "Teal'c." The wheeled trucks would have to be hauled up the shallow platform stairs as soon as the Gate had engaged.

"Dan," moaned Emmett.

"Shhh, Tom. We'll be home in a minute." Jack tried not to remember that the supporting embrace was something they almost certainly knew from different and more intimate circumstances. He tried not to look at them.

"Sixty … uuhhhhh." Emmett's groan was drowned in the raging whoosh of Stargate activation.

"You'll be okay." There was nothing in Daniel's tone that wouldn't have been there if the injured man were Jack, or anyone else. Or Sam, probably. Jack still didn't want to watch. He and Teal'c hoisted the artifact-laden hand truck up, and up, and once more _up_   onto the smooth platform surface.

Jack turned, saw the shimmer of the Gate and two men entwined in a single outline in front of it. "Daniel, Emmett, goddammit get through there! The trucks will be right behind you!" Teal'c was nearly there.

He turned back for the second truck, and saw Ivan and Stanopous and Carter already tilting it, pulling it over the stairs, onto the platform. "Good ma— Good, Major. Take it through." He could see Penn just below the platform watching for any further blue-headed pursuit. "Penn and I will take the rear."

Penn finished a full 360-degree survey. "They're staying back for the moment, sir."

"Good. Let's go."

Two minutes and an aeon of sub-molecular vivisection later, they were gasping on the ramp in the Gateroom. Jack managed to stay upright. "Did anyone pick up one of those arrows? I want to know what they were made of."

"There's the one in Corporal Emmett's leg," said Daniel, disengaging from a clump of medical personnel around a gurney. "You'll have to negotiate with Medical for it, though. The doc wants to test it for poisons."

"Okay, okay. She gets it first." _Corporal Emmett?_   Was that how it was going to be? "The general will want us for debriefing."

# # #

The debriefing included all aspects of the natives they had observed, and preliminary evaluations of the two collection sites. Jack commended Major Ivan and her team in strictly professional and well-deserved terms. That was all anyone here needed to know, anyway. Wasn't it?

Carter burbled about Goa'uld versus Goa'uld-influenced relics and instruments, about gold and naqahda surviving longer than other metals, and post-Goa'uld re-use of materials. Daniel talked about early Sumerian versions of _Gilgamesh_   with grimly intellectual enthusiasm.

Still and all, Jack reckoned that bringing back two SG teams with only one, non-critical injury among them was a good job. Better, the injured party wasn't Daniel.

It was someone, Jack thought very privately and very silently, remembering the familiarly-twined couple at the Gate, who had extra motivation for the deed, even if he couldn't say so in this man's army, and if that was the key to keeping Daniel safe in the field… Jack's thoughts ground to a halt. He wasn't going to go there. Besides, as he remembered that last, shamelessly eavesdropped-on conversation, Daniel and Emmett hadn't been on the best of terms just then. Had they? Jack hadn't had a "dating" relationship since the 70s, but the aggrieved tone of the exchange had sounded more in the "seriously pissed no longer dating" category.

Except that… immediately afterward, Emmett had taken an arrow that had Daniel's name on it, and Daniel had busted a gut to get Emmett back home with all his remaining pieces intact. You did that for teammates, pissed-off or not. On Jack O'Neill's team you did. And they were, and they had, and they'd shut up about anything else. So what was the problem?

With the team, nothing. Emmett had done the right thing. Daniel was okay. Daniel had done the right thing. Well and good. But still… Jack thought he knew Daniel, and here was something he'd never guessed. Dammit, he liked Daniel, even if he often felt like a collie trying to herd a raccoon.

Maybe very, very, very off the record, he'd have to talk to Daniel about it — because he didn't get it. And while he didn't want to _get it_ , he had to know what it meant. He was still reeling from the idea of a break in Daniel's devotion to Sha're, let alone the rest of it. He just wanted to know what was going on.

# # #

Not entirely to Jack's surprise, he eventually found Daniel in the infirmary, sitting at Corporal Emmett's bedside, talking slowly and intensely in the moderate privacy of one of the corner bedspaces. Jack glimpsed that much and backed away before he could overhear anything — anything more, he amended mentally. He was going to have to confess the eavesdropping to Daniel if he didn't just bury this thing whole, the way he ought to. His rueful thought was interrupted when he bumped into Major Ivan, all but literally.

"Sorry about that," he said, as smoothly as possible for someone who'd come within in inch of stepping on an officer and a lady. "But, you know, I'm not sorry to see you." He herded her, politely but not subtly, back out the door. "You're here to check on Corporal Emmett, am I right?"

"Yes sir." She did polite-not-subtle pretty well herself.

"He's fine right now, but he's got another visitor. Maybe I could buy you a cup of coffee while they talk about scribes and scrolls and whether Hammurabi had anything to do with the Code of Hammurabi, or whatever. If you have the time."

Her eyebrows went up for a moment and then down again and her mouth flexed in amusement that wasn't allowed to be a smile. "Hammurabi," she said in mock horror. "Your Doctor Jackson is sort of appealing, but the way he talks… It isn't catching, is it? I'm not sure I really want a conversation about carbon-dating at every meal."

Identifying one of Daniel's favorite camp-coffeepot diatribes, Jack snorted. "Like I said, he speaks fluent caffeine. Me, I just drink the stuff. How about it?" He led the way toward the officer's canteen, since the coffee there was marginally better than the mess hall's, and she followed.

When they both had cups of something brown and caffeinated, Jack said, "I've been meaning to say how impressed I am with your team, Major."

"Shouldn't you be?" she inquired, coolly pleasant now that she was seated and holding a full cup.

"Satisfied, yes. No question about that. Impressed — well, Daniel usually draws enemy fire like a magnet. Somehow Emmett was effective at covering him this time. That takes talent."

"It didn't do Emmett much good."

"'Fraid not," said Jack apologetically. "I figured Jackson should have a chance to thank him." _Or whatever_.

"Ah ha." She lifted the styrofoam cup at him in salute. "Well. We all came home." She sipped her black coffee and then she smiled, actually smiled. "Thanks."

"Yeah, well, like you say, Daniel is appealing," — apparently in ways Jack didn't much want to think about — "and overall he pulls his weight, but…" He shrugged.

"Carbon-dating," she said. "And what the hell was he talking about the whole time on P9R?"

"Early Babylonian writing," said Jack. "I think. That's about par for the course. He's okay. Just… unexpected." Very.

# # #

There was a bar — not the one where he'd met Tom — called the High Rise, ostensibly in tribute to the Colorado scenery. It served good beer and had no dance floor, no frills, and no female patrons. Daniel spotted a sign: _Thursday night is Ladies night: Women only._ Fortunately, today was Friday.

He'd thought he was here to scratch an itch, but he surprised himself by having a normal conversation — his acquaintance at the bar behaved as though it was normal — about ice hockey. That part was easy; he pretended he was Jack, quoting liberally from the running commentary he'd heard during the last television-and-pizza evening they'd shared.

Halfway through it, he was sure the other man wasn't any more interested in hockey than he was. He said into a pro-forma remark about goal-keeping: "Do you want to fuck?"

"Huh… uh… yeah," said Bob, whose key ring consisted of the initials KLD.

"Me?"

Bob put down his beer bottle. "If you…" A glance up and down his body.

"Uh," said Daniel, "am I going too fast for you?"

Bob was an attractive man near Daniel's age whose ancestors had come mostly from North Africa. Daniel remembered someone he'd known briefly a few years ago: sex in Moroccan French, heat and sweat at the edge of the Sahara. "No," said Bob in his newscaster-Midwestern English, "but you're going pretty fast. Are you sure you know what you want?"

Daniel shrugged. "No, but maybe it's time to find out." He wanted a warm body, a willing partner, a meeting that was a little more than flesh, but not too much more. He needed not to think.

"Maybe," said Bob, dark eyes looking at Daniel with suddenly wary intensity. "What do you think you want?"

"Someone like you," said Daniel, purely as a line, and then heard himself and looked at Bob again. The man could be a far-descended cousin of Sha're's tribe.

Damn.

"Maybe," said Bob hopefully, "You'd like…"

Daniel closed his eyes. The warm flush of arousal was cold ashes. "No, I'm sorry. You're right. I'm going too fast and I don't know what I want. I thought… maybe next time." He stumbled to his feet and out the door and leaned against a blind window. He wanted Sha're and she wasn't here. He wanted to scratch an itch, but that wasn't here any more either.

Well, wasn't that a joke? He was married, wasn't he? He'd forgotten for a little while, but now he remembered.

If only it were true.

# # #


	2. Chapter 2

Jack decided, provisionally, not to talk with Daniel about whatever he might or might not have done with Emmett off base, since Daniel was patently no longer doing anything with anybody who wasn't an early Sumerian; his conversation was one long verbal dissertation about Mesopotamia. If he was burying himself in what he called "divergent back-analysis" just to avoid real life, Jack needed a better reason than concerns he couldn't even talk about directly, to break the ivory-tower roadblock.

Their next few missions didn't produce written artifacts. SG-1 was fast becoming SGC's first-contact specialty team, with uninhabited planets and interesting ruins assigned to others. Between times, Daniel buried himself in reference books and web searches while he worked on the P9R scrolls and tablets eighteen hours a day.

For weeks. Weekends included. Even Sam took to checking on him to make sure there was food in his immediate vicinity before she went home. Sometimes he ate it, sometimes he didn't. Jack knew this because he'd caught Sam at it, one fine eight-thirty p.m. when he'd dropped by to lure his preoccupied archaeologist to the mess hall.

It was also by near-accident that Jack discovered Teal'c, two weeks into the marathon, very quietly and implacably removing Daniel from his lab to the on-base sleeping quarters at midnight. He heard subdued muttering in Chulaki in the corridor late one evening, sounding precise from Teal'c, slurred from Daniel. Jack caught sight of a distinctive, massive outline next to Daniel's comparatively slighter frame where he slumped against a doorway, arguing. Teal'c answered quietly, laid one large hand on Daniel's shoulder, maneuvered him into the room, and closed the door on him. It was all done with Teal'c's innate dignity, but Daniel might have been two instead of thirty-two.

Jack caught up with his most alien, and in some ways most reliable, team member. "Teal'c, was that what I thought I saw?"

Teal'c looked at him. "I do not know, O'Neill. What did you think you saw?"

"You putting Daniel to bed."

"I have advised him to sleep. I have placed him in an environment where he will not be distracted."

"Okay, yeah. Do you do this every night?"

"Only when he does not sleep of his own volition."

"Teal'c, has Daniel seemed different to you lately? He's always got a project going, but isn't he overdoing it these days?"

"His compulsion to translate 'rocks' is not unprecedented."

"Yeah, he's been like this before. Kinda. But—" Jack looked up at the uncommunicative face. If Daniel had told Teal'c anything, Teal'c wasn't talking about it.

He had to try. "I thought he was living in town, seeing people, doing things off base sometimes. He hasn't been outside at all lately."

"He has been like this before," Teal'c repeated.

If it wasn't directly related to a Stargate expedition, Jack couldn't pull rank. Teal'c had been using, abusing, avoiding, evading and just generally _dealing with_   rank of all types and kinds since before Jack was born, and practice had definitely made perfect.

# # #

Daniel woke up, so to speak, several days later. He appeared for breakfast, or rather for coffee, in the mess hall while Jack was finishing a plateful of reconstituted scrambled eggs he hoped would keep him going longer than the SG trainee teams. He paused in mid-bite at the sight of the archaeologist. "Read any good stones lately?"

"Hah," said Daniel, "hah." He eyed the eggs as though he wondered which prehistoric bird had laid them.

"Seriously, Archimedes, where have you been? It's been too long since you've seen the light of day."

"Assyria and P9R-345," said Daniel. "It's a whole new _Gilgamesh_." His eyes got vague and dreamy. "Pity I can't publish it. Do you think I could say it was speculative retelling or… I mean, most people think Gilgamesh is a legend anyway, I mean, it _is_   but what it says about Uruk and Sumeria, and on Earth the version from early Babylon…" He stared into some unseeable distance.

"Ask the general," said Jack, knowing perfectly well what Hammond's response would be.

Daniel did too, from the way his face fell. "Not kind, Jack. That book on my desk, if the material had been discovered on Earth, would get me onto the faculty of any history or anthropology department, anywhere. Me, the pariah of the academic world. You could at least pretend it's significant."

"Would you want to go back to school?" asked Jack, wondering if this was a real ambition of Daniel's or just lingering awareness of a rejection that must have been devastating at the time. He'd realized, long after the first trip to Abydos, that Daniel had had even less to lose than he did: it had only become clear after several weeks that no one on Earth outside the SG project even cared that Dr. Jackson never came back. "They didn't treat you very well."

"They're a bunch of stuffy old farts…" Daniel poured half the mug of coffee down his throat, "except the ones that aren't. There are always a few odd apples in the barrel. Like me, I guess. The rest aren't worth the time, but I'd still like to show them."

"You know you can't."

"I can't," agreed Daniel, almost cheerful. "At least I know why." He took in Jack's camouflage-mottled garb. "Are we supposed to go out today and nobody told me? How long did you say it's been…" He managed to combine alarm and pleading in one expression.

"I'm leading a training session for SG-4 and SG-8," said Jack. "If you're at loose ends today, it wouldn't hurt you to come along. You'd get lots of good, clean, healthy exercise, for a change." Too late, he remembered that Corporal Emmett would be in the group as well, recovered from his arrow wound and needing both re-evaluation and a refresher. Jack therefore smiled in as sadistic a fashion as possible. "Running up and down hills, scaling cliffs, attacking forts where you don't know what's inside, that kind of thing."

"Is that an order?" asked Daniel warily, not that the argument would be over if it was.

Jack sobered, relieved. "Not today." He smiled again, still showing teeth. "Your turn will come."

Daniel shuddered and finished his coffee in two long swallows. "Good. I really ought to see if my apartment is still there."

"You do that," said Jack, thinking uneasily that he shouldn't be making an effort to insulate Daniel from Emmett. And he wouldn't. He'd get Emmett okayed for field work and leave it _alone_ , just _alone_ , since he wasn't supposed to know anything about it. Whatever "it" was. He gave Daniel another glance, but Daniel was looking wistfully toward the coffee urns where someone was changing the filter and putting in fresh grounds.

# # #

Jack managed to ignore the whole question for quite a while after that. He assigned Daniel to the SG-9 training sessions which were designed to teach a primarily diplomatic team when to duck, when to dig in, and when to run. Daniel came back apparently recovered from his _Gilgamesh_  -induced daze and didn't make any more noises about missing the academic community. He went on teaching Teal'c English and learning the languages Teal'c knew; he made bad science jokes with Sam; he listened only politely when Jack explained ice hockey but he must have been paying attention, because he succeeded in explaining it to Teal'c. He even went home to his own apartment now and then, or to Jack's to watch the hockey games he pretended not to understand.

Jack just didn't think about what the man might be doing on weekends. He liked Daniel and he intended to go on liking Daniel; and he wanted him to stay out of trouble, which meant leaving the whole subject severely alone.

He stuck his head into Daniel's lab one afternoon, and to his surprise found Daniel apparently fondling Major Ivan's throat. Teal'c was watching them both, but the more interesting fact was that Major Ivan was not protesting. Jack cleared his throat.

Daniel looked up without removing his hands from the major's swan-like white neck, which was fully exposed by an unbuttoned top button on her fatigues. "Just a minute."

"Wha—" said the Major, and removed herself effortlessly from Daniel's grasp. "Sir."

"What's going on here?"

"Sir?"

"Susan's showing me what the P9R natives sounded like," said Daniel, as if unaware that linguistic research was not normally synonymous with neck-fondling. Given that Daniel had learned Abydonian Egyptian from his wife, maybe for him it was.

Daniel ignored Jack's raised eyebrows. "Teal'c, you say it." He reached with a smooth, practiced gesture to lay three fingers on Teal'c's broad neck at the adam's-apple, his other hand behind the point of the jaw. Teal'c allowed it.

"Should I repeat the sound Major Ivan made, or should I say what it might mean?"

"Say the words it sounds like to you."

Teal'c said something with a lot of hard consonants, and Daniel nodded. "Again." Teal'c repeated it, and Daniel whirled away to note down a series of unfamiliar but alphabetical-looking symbols. Then he repeated the phrase-or-whatever. "Was that it, Teal'c? Was that what you remember, Susan?"

"Yes," said Teal'c.

The major threw a glance at Jack, who lowered his eyebrows and shrugged. "That's what Teal'c said, allowing for the different pitch in your voices, but what I heard on P9R-345 wasn't exactly the same."

"How was it different?"

"About an octave higher in pitch, much louder, and the vowels were longer."

"Only the vowels?"

"One of the consonants wasn't exact, but they were all close."

"All right. You say it again." He seized the major's neck again, just as he had Teal'c's. Ivan rolled her eyes at Jack, who nearly grinned. Daniel in full research mode would have ignored Lady Godiva, let alone an extra inch of bared neck, even if he was interested.

"Hmmm, was it—" Daniel released her and repeated the sound himself.

Major Ivan nodded. "Very close. There's a kind of hissing overtone I'm not able to give it."

"Just what," broke in Jack, "are you doing here?"

"Jack, did you know Major Ivan has eidetic recall?"

Jack looked again at the major, who shrugged back at him. Eidetic memory wasn't visible on her face, but then, it wasn't. "I don't think anyone ever said. Should they have?"

"She can repeat — exactly, as far as human hearing is exact — everything the P9R people said in her hearing. And Teal'c recognized it!"

"Their speech is much like an old dialect of the most common Goa'uld language," said Teal'c.

"It is?" Jack wasn't liking this at all. "They're Goa'uld?"

"I suppose that's possible," said Daniel, "but I think it's more likely the Goa'uld enslaved them at some time. Most of the languages we've heard on other planets are essentially what the Goa'uld that took those people spoke, or what Goa'uld speak now. If these blue people speak a very old Goa'uld dialect, either the Goa'uld that taught it to them have been completely isolated from other Goa'uld for centuries, or they've been _gone_   for centuries, maybe millennia."

"They have a working Stargate," said Jack. "Sooo— It's not likely they've really been isolated. What if there's a Goa'uld in charge, sending those war parties out to the Gate to make sure nobody else gets a toehold on the planet?"

"Would a Goa'uld leave an old workshop and a library sitting right there for anybody to find?"

"Maybe," said Jack, but it was a reasonable question.

"I'd say they were afraid of anything coming through the Gate," said Major Ivan. "They ignored the old buildings both times we were there. They didn't especially try to stop us taking those things. They just wanted us gone."

"So what are they?" asked Jack.

"It is possible those beings are not suitable Goa'uld hosts," said Teal'c. "There were Goa'uld on that world at one time, but with Tau'ri hosts, were there not?"

"Yes," said Daniel, with finality. "That's definite. The languages from the library were from Earth, derived from some of the oldest recorded…" Jack cleared his throat warningly. "Oh, ah, well, yes, you're right."

"Tau'ri?" asked Major Ivan.

"Humans," said Daniel.

"People of the race that originated here. From this world of the Tau'ri," said Teal'c.

"Earth?" she said, wide-eyed. "There's a Goa'uld word for it?"

Daniel nodded. "Oh, yes. The Goa'uld _like_   humans." Jack heard the bitterness in it, but Daniel simply went on explaining. "We're good hosts. Our bodies tolerate them, even adapt to them." He flicked a glance at Teal'c. "It's possible a race like the P9R people aren't as compatible. That would explain why the world isn't taken over, if the people there aren't useful to them but they put up too much fight to make it worth wiping them out."

"If a system lord truly wanted the planet," said Teal'c, "that race would not stand a chance. Their weapons are effective of their type, but primitive."

That matched Jack's assessment. He said, "But it looks like none of the system lords have bothered to do it. Why?"

Teal'c gave the tiny nod that he used instead of a shrug. "Perhaps the planet has no important resources. Major Ivan's initial survey showed no naqahda except in the artifacts near the Stargate."

The major nodded agreement. "Sam went over the surveys with me, and she said any heavy minerals are trapped in the planet's core. Something about weak tectonic activity, nothing to push heavier elements to the surface." She shrugged. "As far as the survey instruments we have can tell, that is. But if there are people — whatever they look like — who like to kick Goa'uld butt… That's got to be a good thing for us."

Jack grinned at her in perfect accord. "You got it. These guys could be on our side."

"They don't seem to know it," she said.

"But thanks to you and Teal'c," Daniel grinned too, "we have a common language!"

"Uh-oh," said Jack. He could see where this was going.

Right, it was. "We need to talk to them if we want to confirm any of those hypotheses," said Daniel. "Teal'c and Susan and I have a lot of work to do."

Oh, well, a busy linguist-archaeologist was a happy linguist-archaeologist. Jack knew that much. "Okay, I guess. Don't keep Major Ivan up too late. And, Daniel, it's late now. Normal people are eating dinner. You can start again tomorrow."

"Dinner?" said Daniel, blinking vaguely. "Oh. Go on, then, Susan. Jack probably wants to tell you something fascinating about the mess cuisine. He's always explaining it to me, as if that could make it better somehow. I have to check the samples you've given me with what Teal'c knows… uh," his head swiveled. "Teal'c, are you hungry now too?"

"I would prefer to continue this analysis," said Teal'c. "I will eat later."

All of which suited Jack just fine. "Well, Major? Dinner?"

She nodded crisply and buttoned up her tunic. "Yes sir. Is it mystery stew or curious casserole tonight?"

Jack grinned. "Let's find out."

# # #

Days went by with only one, uneventful, expedition for SG-1 to a planet with no perceptible artifacts — Goa'uld, human or otherwise — other than the Stargate. SG-6 and SG-3 ran into a minor system lord and got away with all their members and one or two devices that Sam seized with scientific delight. Makepeace could not be called delighted that a team with two women had successfully watched his back (reading between the lines, Jack guessed they had saved his ass), but he had very little choice but to commend SG-6 on a job well done.

Jack got the go-ahead to revisit P9R-345 after a conference with General Hammond and Teal'c. Teal'c said he would be able to interpret for the P9R natives if indeed they spoke the dialect, Go-el-tan, that he knew.

"And Daniel?" asked Jack.

"He, too, will be able to interpret," said Teal'c. "Even if they speak some other language, Daniel Jackson will learn what he wants to know."

"That certainly sounds like Doctor Jackson," said Hammond, somewhere between resigned and proud.

"Indeed," said Teal'c, and the inclination of his head was all pride.

# # #

The afternoon before they were to leave for P9R-345 again, Jack checked Daniel's lab, knowing SG-5 had brought back a box full of carved rocks that resembled pre-Columbian Mesoamerican figurines to an amazing degree, or so Daniel had said, before starting to mutter in some non-English language while he pored over them.

Sure enough, Daniel was there, examining one of the artifacts under a magnifying scanner. Jack cleared his throat. "Ahh, Daniel?"

Daniel looked up, eyes re-focusing slowly and incompletely without his glasses. "Oh, hello."

"Mission tomorrow to P9R-345, remember? We go through the Gate at 800." Jack saw, without great surprise, that Teal'c sat at the table where neat rows of similar stone figures were laid out. "You, too, Teal'c."

"Yes, Colonel O'Neill."

"I remember, Jack. I wish Susan could come with us."

"Major Ivan has better things to do than act as a human tape recorder," said Jack. Major Ivan meant SG-6, which meant too many complications for Jack's taste. "You've got your own recording equipment, right?"

"Sure, but it's not the same."

"It'll have to do. A mission tomorrow means sleep tonight, Daniel. Not read, not look at little statues, not research websites about the Aztecs. Sleep."

"Yes, Jack."

"He will do so," said Teal'c.

"Glad I can depend on somebody around here. See ya."

Jack ducked out again, but not before he heard, "One nanny at a time is enough," from Daniel, and an answering rumble from Teal'c. The lighter-voiced reply from Daniel faded out as he walked down the corridor, but it might have ended on a chuckle.

He thought nothing more about it until late that evening, when Daniel's little chuckle sounded somewhere nearby, and Teal'c's deep rumble answered it. Teal'c was still on babysitting duty, evidently, but when Jack rounded the corner the voices had come from, neither of his team members was in sight.

# # #

Maybe that should have warned Jack, but it didn't. He signed out and went home, and signed in again in the morning, noticing that Daniel had stayed on base for the night. That wasn't unusual, after all. It was only when he found Teal'c and Daniel together in the mess hall, and watched Teal'c speaking not in English, not with stone-faced restraint, that the details fell into a pattern. He didn't know Chulaki, he didn't know what Teal'c was saying, and he _definitely_   didn't know what they'd been doing in particular… but it was more than language lessons.

And he still couldn't talk about it, and he still didn't get it. Was Daniel with _Teal'c_ , for crying out loud? Who was the closest thing to a Goa'uld he — or, he thought, Daniel — wanted to see on Earth. Ever. What Teal'c might see in Daniel… well, who knew, but it defied imagination. Jack's imagination, anyway.

They were his people, his team. He had to understand what it meant to them, just to know what was going on. In less than an hour he had to lead SG-1 through the Gate and try to make meaningful contact with blue-faced aliens who hated the Goa'uld, who thought they hated humans because humans looked like the Goa'uld, and he had to know the team was solid.

He grabbed Daniel's elbow on the way to the locker room and pulled him into a side corridor. "A word, Daniel."

"Huh?" Daniel, oblivious as usual to social niceties, let alone military decorum, shrugged and leaned back against the wall. "What word? Are you having trouble with some kind of language thing?"

"Not a language thing. Uhhh…" It wouldn't be prudent, and it broke some regulations, to just ask, _Are you fucking with Teal'c_ , or even to suggest it. It wouldn't even answer his real question. "You know Teal'c better than anyone else here."

Daniel looked puzzled, and then wary. "Kind of. I guess. That's a language thing, you know. His English is really good by now, but—"

"I just want to know if you and he are going to have any problems working together."

Daniel was paler than usual in the fluorescent lighting. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and blinked at Jack, looking exactly like a clueless academic. "Not at all," he said, voice clear and smooth and lying. Then he caught his breath and smiled. "Not at all." The truth.

Oh, shit. Now what? "Can you be sure?"

Daniel sighed. His color was back to normal. "Jack, there are things I can't talk about." He glanced at the gray walls around them. "I can't explain some things about Teal'c in English. Does that answer your question?" His eyes stayed on Jack's for a moment, anxious.

"I guess it has to." He held Daniel's eyes, trying to look calm, and accepting, and business-as-usual. "But I will need to know if there's anything that might hurt the team."

"Anything that does… Teal'c understands the team comes first." He pushed at his glasses again, which didn't need it. "Ya know?"

"That's my line," said Jack.

"Yes." Daniel was still watching him.

"It's okay with me. Really. But you both know the rules. The team comes first." Daniel nodded. "Good. Let's go hear what's waiting for us on P9R-345." Jack didn't know, and didn't want to know, what Daniel wasn't telling him, but if he needed to know… Maybe he didn't. Maybe he trusted them both.

# # #

This time they stumbled out onto the stone platform of P9R-345's Stargate under the startled, and quickly hostile, eyes of eight blue-tinged humanoids. Staring at the honed points of eight arrows, Jack reflected that he'd never seen a faster reaction to a perceived threat.

"Jal'fesi!" screamed one, and continued with an outpouring of squeaky speech that meant nothing to Jack. Daniel was shaking his head and listening carefully, with no hint of enlightenment on his face. Teal'c, on the other hand, screamed something back at them. The bows didn't waver.

Two exchanges of shouts later, the first speaker shrilled something that sounded to Jack like an order instead of a threat. He tensed, but this time the bows lowered a little. Jack kept his weapon at ready, and saw that Carter was doing the same. Good. Daniel twitched, and Teal'c answered again. "What?" asked Jack. If something was going on, he wanted to know what. Now.

"They understand that we say we're not Goa'uld," said Daniel. "I think. I'm only getting parts of this."

"They ask that we prove we are not enemy gods," said Teal'c.

"How do we do that?"

"I do not know what they will accept as proof."

"Do we _look_   like Goa'uld?" demanded Jack. "Don't the Snakes usually put on more of a show with fancy armor and glowing eyes and all?"

Teal'c inclined an eyebrow. "That is true." He spoke in slow, sharp phrases to the blue leader. The leader, still holding a weapon at near-ready, replied with similar phrases, while he (or she, or it, Jack reminded himself) made circular eye motions of the too-large, too-round eyes in a mostly-flat face. Teal'c repeated some of the phrases and added others.

"What's he saying?" hissed Jack to Daniel.

"Ummm, that if we had the power of the gods, good or bad, we would display it like— um, as befits a god. We see that they also are not gods but true beings… people… singular people… people who are not enslaved to gods. Um… just a minute."

"We're not sure of that," said Jack.

Daniel was suddenly more tense. "Teal'c is nudging them to the point that if they're Goa'uld, or have Goa'uld leaders anywhere, they'll have to show us. _If_   they have the kind of pride human warrior cultures have, that is."

"Do they?"

"No idea," said Daniel. "But if anyone could know, it would be Teal'c."

That wasn't the end of it, by a long shot, but eventually they all retreated further from the Stargate for further definition of terms that might lead to negotiation.

The P9R people had likely evolved on this very planet, which being a normal, inhabitable liquid-water planet, had a normal rotation and a normal day-night cycle. Thus, they preferred to do something less stressful at night than continue hostilities — or negotiating, which to them appeared to be much the same thing but with fewer casualties. Teal'c and Daniel had managed sufficient understanding with the natives by the day's evening to call an official cease-fire until the next sun-up, predicted in about 10 hours. SG-1 pitched two tents and Jack set up a roster for guard duty, since not even Daniel would say the Blues (or Pa-ra-oo, as they called themselves) could be trusted.

"Doesn't warrior honor, my-word-is-my-bond, mean anything with these guys?"

"We don't know. And, we can't be sure they're saying what we think they're saying in the first place," said Daniel, separating his bedroll from the rest of his pack and heaving it into the tent that already held Teal'c's severely minimalist accommodations. Jack didn't want to comment on that. He'd be sharing the same tent when he wasn't on guard.

"Well, you have first watch," he said, hoping it sounded normal.

Apparently it did. "That's fine," said Daniel. "Who's next?"

"Me. And call me if you see anything that bothers you."

"I will."

# # #

Nothing happened to make Daniel wake Jack before time, and nothing happened during Jack's watch. When it was time for Teal'c to take over, he went back to the tent expecting, in all honesty, to find Daniel sacked out and Teal'c indulging in kel-no-reem. Instead, he heard their voices, low and in one of Teal'c languages.

Time for tact, or whatever a crusty old colonel might have in its place. Jack managed to find a rock to kick aside and stepped hard a couple of times as if avoiding a stumble, before he pushed through the tent flap.

There was no sense of sudden movement from the two figures sitting together over Daniel's notebook with a penlight. They might have been touching. They might not have. Jack cleared his throat. "Teal'c? It's your watch."

"Yes, Colonel O'Neill," said Teal'c smoothly, as he rose to the stooped crouch that was all the tent allowed. He added something in low-pitched squeaks to Daniel, who shook his head.

"What was that?"

"I told him to rest."

"Will he?"

Teal'c looked back at Daniel. "That remains to be seen." He picked up his staff weapon and departed silently.

"Daniel, get some sleep."

"Sure, just let me finish this word."

"You're making up words?" asked Jack.

"The Parau use a derivative of Goeltan, which is a cousin… maybe an ancestor, not a derivative… of Goa'uld, which is also a cousin of both Chulaki and Abydonian speech. The similarities are there, but it's a little complicated. I'm trying out some variance patterns with the Parau phoneme scheme."

"Uh huh, yeah, whatever," said Jack. "You've been up all night doing that with Teal'c?"

"Sure." Daniel looked up at him and pushed up his glasses with the hand holding the penlight, sending wild shadows all over the inner surface of the tent. "What else?"

"Nothing," said Jack, resolving not to think any more tonight. "Just, get some sleep. You won't do us any good tomorrow if you can't stay awake."

"Yes, Jack," said Daniel patiently. "As soon as I finish this bit."

# # #

Whatever Daniel had been doing, it apparently worked. By the end of their second day on P9R-345, they had a verbal agreement — in Goeltan, which made it a binding treaty to the blue guys, or so Teal'c said — of limited alliance: enough that they could count on the Parau not shooting at SG-uniformed teams, which would be allowed to use the area around the Gate. It made for a decent bolt hole, and opened the door to learning more about the Parau and what appeared, possibly, to be a physiological immunity to Goa'uld takeover.

Sam was interested enough in that to have spent an hour with the Parau team's closest approximation of a medic, Teal'c translating, asking questions that Jack hoped to hell wouldn't get them thrown back out for overfamiliarity. Nevertheless, as the sun dipped toward the flat horizon Jack went over to where Sam, Teal'c and the Parau medic were still trading sentences, and made a stab at pronouncing the squeaky hello-goodbye greeting Teal'c had taught them all. "Got everything you need, Captain?" he inquired when they all turned to him. "We're not spending another night here."

"Right, sir." She glanced at Teal'c.

"I will tell this person that you are honored to have spoken with him," said Teal'c.

"Please do that." Sam spread her hands at the Parau and said hello-goodbye, accurately as far as Jack could tell, and they all listened to the Parau's reply. Teal'c merely spread his empty hands, as did the Parau, and it appeared that honor was even and they could leave now. Jack detached Daniel with only moderate difficulty from a point-and-speak session with the Parau leader, and after more leave-taking gestures they made it back through the Gate without being shot at even once during the whole trip.

Mission accomplished.

# # #

Since they were unharmed and more than ready to debrief, Hammond agreed to hear about the treaty with the Parau immediately. Daniel and Teal'c handed over the audio recording of it and explained it all in two languages, one of which Hammond understood no more than Jack, but Hammond was more polite about it. Sam chipped in with her own speculations about Parau physiology, and ended by asking the general's permission for a project proposal that would require time from medical personnel.

When she started explaining it in detail, with Teal'c to help, Jack caught Hammond's eye and was excused silently, then caught Daniel's and jerked his head toward the exit. It was time to have a talk with Daniel, as off-base and as off-the-record as possible. He wasn't quite sure how to have this talk with Teal'c, or even if he needed to. Daniel first.

"They'll be here another hour if Sam wants that project cleared while her samples are fresh. What say we grab some chow and maybe find something to watch on TV?"

"Like hockey again?" asked Daniel, but he wasn't saying no.

"Like any team sport."

"That stuff is all just stylized war games, Jack."

Jack shrugged, vaguely surprised at how well it fit. "The key words there are 'stylized' and 'game.' Nobody gets killed, and you have the fun of winning."

"Well, yeah…"

"C'mon, you'll like it." Jack edged him toward the elevator and the outside world.

"That's what you always say," muttered Daniel, but he allowed Jack to take charge of his evening with no further protests.

They picked up Chinese food, which was indecently good after the days of field rations, and settled in to watch the Penguins and the Sabres swoop mercilessly around each other. While someone was being penalized for "unsportsman-like conduct," Jack sat up, stretched and finished his second beer. "About you and Teal'c."

"Uh?" Daniel looked up from the screen. "That was pretty rough. Are you sure nobody gets killed in these games?"

"Not usually. Those are hockey sticks, not staff weapons. And about…"

Daniel was looking at him now. "And about Teal'c. Yeah." He raked a hand through his floppy hair. "What you think… I know what you think." He pinned Jack with a direct stare. "Don't I?"

Jack took refuge in a shrug. He wasn't any good at talking about relationships. If this was a relationship, he shouldn't be talking about it anyway. He was better at bending rules, so he put an inquiring look on his face and didn't say anything.

Daniel stared at him for a moment longer before his eyes went dangerously blank. Uh-oh, Daniel was annoyed. "You think Teal'c and I are sleeping together," said Daniel, conversationally. He was unreadable now; he must be very annoyed. At Jack's continued silence, he frowned. "But, oh yeah, you can't ask that. Well, don't talk, just listen.

"Teal'c and I have been together day and night lately because I've been trying to get Goa'uld and Goeltan into my head all day, every day, and he's willing to teach it to me. We're, I guess, friends now, and don't think I'm not surprised about that." Daniel stared defiantly at him.

"Is that all?" Jack tried to sound neutral.

"No, of course it's not all! We're friends because you and the SGC have made it impossible for either of us to do what we have to without putting SG team loyalty first. He can't work against the Goa'uld, and I can't find Sha're, without the Stargate, without you and the team. Maybe that's the only way. It's the only way Teal'c or I have, and we both know it. He understands that. You've fucking hot-house force-grown us into members of this _team_ , and" — Daniel was red-faced, whether from anger or embarrassment — " _that's what is going on._ "

"Okay," said Jack, a little nonplussed. "Are you still surprised that Teal'c joined us?" Jack had appreciated having his life saved on Chulak, but he also knew that bringing Teal'c to Earth was very possibly the difference between winning or losing against the Goa'uld. That was Teal'c's reasoning too, he thought.

"Not really." Daniel slumped back into the sofa and didn't look at Jack. "Does all that answer your question?"

"You and Teal'c are both important there."

"We are?"

"Definitely. Together or separately. But I need to understand it if I can."

"Jack…" Daniel had picked up his mostly-empty beer bottle and edged a thumbnail under the label. "Jack, maybe I have to explain this, but I'm only going to say it once and I don't want Teal'c to hear about it. Ever. Promise that now."

"I…" Should he make a promise like this when Teal'c couldn't be consulted? Oh, hell, he was the team's commander. He had to know. He had to trust Daniel as well as Teal'c. "Okay. It's absolutely off the record." Jack prepared to hear things he didn't want to know about.

Daniel peeled up a strip of the yellow-brown paper, and started speaking slowly, as though English were foreign to him. "Teal'c is a friend now, and I trust him. I've learned a lot from him, not just the languages. He knows things I didn't tell him about myself, from listening when I didn't know what I was saying. I've heard some of what he says, too. All that." He peeled up another bit of label. "And I couldn't have sex with him if my life depended on it."

Jack felt his eyebrows fly upward. There were surprises and surprises.

Daniel went on, still staring down at the tattered label. "I feel horrible, Jack. I'm ashamed of this. I like to think I'm more rational than…"

After a long silence broken by muted noise from the television, Jack said, "More rational than what?"

"Than to hate Teal'c because of his symbiote." Somewhere in the background, Buffalo scored a goal to cheers and screams. "I can't… not remember what he is. Physically. He's a good friend. He's a good person. He's also a Jaffa, and that makes a difference to me."

"You hate him?" said Jack, trying to put it together. Daniel didn't mean that, surely?

"I hate his symbiote."

Aha. "You don't hate him. Not as himself."

"Not him, himself, I guess. I don't want to, anyway. I like him — but not what he is."

"What does Teal'c think of the… Junior?"

Daniel set down the bottle with gentle finality. "We don't talk about it."

"But you're friends with him, right?"

"With Teal'c himself, yes." Daniel paused and smiled. "He lets me talk to him. Do you have any idea how much that means?"

"Maybe." Jack remembered two mornings ago, when Teal'c and Daniel had sat over breakfast, not meeting each other's eyes as though they knew everything about each other already. "What did you talk about the night before we left for P9R-345?"

"Oh, that." Daniel got the mouth-pinched looked he'd worn for his first full month at SGC. "I told him some things about Sha're. He… apologized, I guess you'd say, but in Chulaki that wasn't what it—"

So, Daniel was back to normal, explaining at incomprehensible length. Jack cut him off. "As long as you worked it out between you, fine. Good."

"Good?" said Daniel. "I'm a xenophobic bigot. How is that good?"

"You're working on it and you're sticking with the team," said Jack. "And, it means you don't have anything to tell me, or not tell me, which is what you'd better do — I mean, not do. Are you getting this?"

"Yes, Jack." Daniel pulled both arms against his body and stared defiantly at the television. "Are the guys in the dark suits with yellow stripes the penguins?"

"Yes. They've got good teamwork, and they're winning," said Jack.

# # #


End file.
